The Most Underrated Video Game You Should Play RIGHT NOW
A Retro Horror Masterpiece
Gameplay wise, Stay Out of the House is an old-school survival horror experience. I mean "old-school" in all of its meanings, as not only are we dealing with the sub-genre's classic set of mechanics - those being limited inventory space, puzzles revolving around keys and items that open new areas of the level, limited offensive options and punishing manual saving checkpoints - but it also applies to the presentation. Stay Out of the House doesn't look like a game that came out in 2023. Its rudimentary polygonal design is intentionally evocative of PS1-era horror games. Not content to stop there, there's also a VHS and CRT filter intended to create the illusion that you're watching a grimy old horror video tape you found in your uncle's attic.
It's more than just a gimmick as well, as the limitations of older technology are used here not just to create a sense of nostalgia, but to contribute to the fear factor. Old horror games had extremely limited draw distances so the environment and enemies would load in as you moved around - see the original Silent Hill for an example of that - and as such Stay Out of the House also has limited draw distances that serve to obfuscate the player's view.
Not only does it brilliantly put the player in the shoes of someone fumbling around a dark house they're unfamiliar with - itself a terrifying prospect as your tormentor knows every inch of their hunting ground - but it invites the player to imagine horrors unable to be conjured by the low poly textures and janky animations. The effect is similar to the film Skinamarink, which also used the obscurity of its image and the whirring grain of a VHS filter to draw you in, imagining shapes in the film where there were none in reality. Great stuff.
Back to how it actually effects gameplay though. See, puzzles here usually amount to finding items and using those items on certain interactable elements in the world. It's a simple loop really, but one made truly nerve wracking because of how difficult the game makes navigating and seeing what's right in front of you.
Hell, in the opening scene, where you're just trapped in a cage and need to figure out how to escape, I was fumbling around for ages trying to figure out what to do. I spent so long in there my character literally died by staring too long at the TV.
Which, by the way, is how I plan on dying in real life too. In reality, my escape was just a 180 spin and a click on a bent bit of wire away, but finding that in the visual haze was easier said than done. Somehow, this never becomes truly frustrating either, probably because if you are having serious trouble progressing, you can just turn the filters off to see clearly and get your bearings.
That lack of power over your senses makes the game's enemies that more terrifying as well. Though there are indicators to where the killer may be, you can never truly trust that he won't emerge from the darkness in front of you and come at you screaming with a butcher knife.
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